Wife killings go up; Over 10 cases so far recorded

The number of women killed by their husbands every month in the country appears to have risen this year.

The Human Rights Advocacy Centre (HRAC), a civil rights group, released a report last year showing that two women are killed every month in Ghana.

The HRAC’s report was based on cases recorded between January 2010 and July 2012.

But despite efforts by the HRAC, then headed by current Gender minister, Nana Oye Lithur, and other groups to reverse the trend, the figure appears to have rather gone up, telling from publicised reported cases of wife killings this year.

The Finder’s investigations showed that more than 10 wives have been killed by their husbands so far this year.

Most of the cases involve farmers and often the killings are hard to explain.

Only last Sunday, a mother of five children, Dorothy Afua Obiri, was killed by her husband in a brutal fashion that shocked the entire Kwahu area. Dorothy’s husband of several years, 47-year-old farmer, George Kwame Ofosu, apparently took offence because Dorothy had left him for her parents’s house at Kwahu Danteng, a town not too far from Kwahu Akwaboa.

Kwame inflicted cuts on the back of Dorothy’s neck and breasts and amputated the wife’s two hands completely. Dorothy was rushed to the hospital but died in the process.

Earlier this month, a 58-year-old farmer, Joseph Kundiaso, also launched an early morning unprovoked attack on his wife at Takpo in the Nadowli-Kaleo District of Upper West Region.

Even more bizarrely, the couple was said to be happily married and yet the husband attacked the wife while she was sleeping by their six year old grandson.

In April, at Agona Nyarkrom in the Central Region, another husband, Kofi Takyi, also a farmer attacked his wife in the middle of his cocoa farm-again without provocation.

Kofi, who attempted to hide his deed, was, however, betrayed by the fact that his wife did not die instantly but lived long enough to disclose her assailant.

In Sefwi-Wiawso in March, a 36-year-old woman, Madam Mary Amofa, who had decided to seek divorce for consistent beating by her husband, was also allegedly murdered by the husband, Benjamin Teye, aged 40, a farmer and palm wine tapper.

At Kukua, a village near Suhum in the Eastern Region, in January, Adwoa Ansah 28, was shot at point blank by her husband of 10 years.

Adwoa’s husband, Isaac Ansah, a 32-year-old farmer, was apparently angry with Adwoa because she had asked him for housekeeping money for the upkeep of their two children, aged five and three.